22 THE CONNECTICUT POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY 



especially in the largely attended field meetings which had 

 been held, and urged that more of the members open their 

 home grounds by invitation to the Society. The moral effect 

 of such a visit to any farm he thought worth many times 

 the bother of entertaining the visitors. 



The fruit season of '97 had been an exceedingly inter- 

 esting one. An abundance of rain had made tremendous 

 crops of small fruits. The berries, etc., were large but 

 rather soft, watery, and not of the usual high flavor ; con- 

 sequently prices had been lower than ever known before in 

 this state. Japanese plums had, for the first time, fruited 

 quite generally throughout the state, and were proving 

 larger, of greater beauty and better quality than most people 

 had supposed. They were destined, in the near future, to 

 be one of the leading market fruits of the state. 



The peach crop had been of uncertain quantity and 

 value ; where the crop had succeeded, the fruit was large 

 and of great beauty, but the poorest in quality that the 

 state had ever seen. Many of the standard freestone va- 

 rieties had clung more or less to the pit, and there had 

 been a general complaint in the market of clingstones, so 

 that the market price had fallen off 50 per cent from that 

 of former years. A lack of preparation on the part of 

 some to take care of the surplus had, for a short season, 

 over-loaded some of the local markets, and this had had 

 considerable to do with the lower prices. 



Mr. Hale also called attention to experiments that had 

 been made by spraying peach trees with whitewash to 

 protect buds against the climatic changes of winter and 

 retard blooming in spring, and urged the members of the 

 Society to take this into consideration. 



" The effect of the repeal of the yellows law was partic- 

 ularly noticed in early August, when many diseased peaches 

 came into the state from New Jersey and Delaware, and 

 demoralized the market for better home-grown fruit. All 

 of this fruit might have been kept out of the state, to the 

 benefit of all concerned, had the law not been repealed. 



" A very serious menace to peaches, cherries and plums 

 is the brown rot, which has been unusually prevalent the 

 past wet season. Spraying with Bordeaux mixture when the 



